IP Geolocation Lookup

What IP geolocation can and cannot tell you

Every device on the public internet is reachable through an IP address, and that address can be mapped to an approximate physical location. The mapping is not magic and it is not GPS. It works because the organizations that hand out IP addresses — regional internet registries and the ISPs they delegate to — publish records about which blocks of addresses belong to which networks and roughly where those networks operate. Commercial geolocation databases combine those registry records with routing data, user-submitted corrections, and Wi-Fi positioning to estimate a location. This tool queries one such service, ipapi.co, and presents the result: country, region, city, postal code, coordinates, timezone, and the network that owns the address.

The accuracy ceiling matters. Country-level results are highly reliable. City-level results are an educated guess that often points to the ISP's regional hub rather than the user's actual neighbourhood, and can be off by tens of kilometres — or land in the wrong city entirely for mobile and satellite connections. IP geolocation is therefore suitable for analytics, content localization, and fraud signals, but never for pinpointing a specific household or person.

The network fields, decoded

Alongside location, the lookup returns details about the network the address belongs to. These are often more reliable and more interesting than the city:

The ASN and organization together are how you tell a real visitor from a bot or a VPN: a request claiming to be a person but originating from a known cloud provider's ASN is a classic automation signal.

A worked example: 8.8.8.8

Enter Google's public DNS address 8.8.8.8 and look it up. The service returns the country (United States), an organization of Google LLC, and an ASN belonging to Google's network. Because the tool also receives latitude and longitude, it builds an OpenStreetMap embed centred on those coordinates with a marker, giving you a visual sense of the reported location. Note that the marker sits at the network's registered point, not at a literal server — which is the perfect illustration of why you should treat the pin as approximate.

Private addresses are detected before any request

Some addresses have no public location by design. The tool checks your input against the reserved ranges first and explains them without wasting a lookup:

• 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16 are private ranges used inside home and office networks.
• 127.0.0.1 (and ::1) is loopback — your own machine.
• fe80:: and fc00:: are IPv6 link-local and unique-local addresses.

If you type one of these, you will see a clear message that it is private and has no public geolocation, rather than a confusing failed request. The My IP button skips manual entry entirely: it asks the service for the address your browser is currently connecting from and looks that up.

Batch mode and practical tips

The Batch tab accepts up to ten addresses, one per line, and returns them in a comparison table with country, city, region, ISP, timezone, and coordinates side by side — convenient for triaging a list of addresses from a server log. A few things worth knowing:

• Rate limits are real. The free tier allows roughly 1,000 lookups per day without an API key. Heavy batch use can exhaust that; if a lookup suddenly returns an error, you may be temporarily limited.
• VPNs and proxies hide the user. A result reflects the exit server's location, not the person behind the VPN. This is a feature for privacy and a caveat for analytics.
• Mobile addresses drift. Carrier-grade NAT means many phone users share a small pool of addresses, so city accuracy on mobile is especially loose.
• Both IPv4 and IPv6 work. Paste either format; the service resolves both.

A note on privacy

Unlike most tools on this site, this one is not fully self-contained: looking up an address sends that address to ipapi.co, and the map embed loads tiles from OpenStreetMap. That is unavoidable, because the geolocation data lives in an external database — your browser cannot know where an arbitrary address is without asking a service that does. The address you enter is the only thing transmitted, and it is sent over HTTPS. If you are researching a sensitive address, be aware that the lookup leaves your browser.